Overheard on campus

“It’s inexplicable to me why [the government is] continuing to literally give money to the banks—and these are supposedly healthy banks.”

Economist Joseph Stiglitz ’64, Nobel laureate and University Professor at Columbia, in a Reunion lecture about the U.S. economy

“In the biographies I talk about today, Muhammad even looks like Abraham. It’s a conscious effort on the part of Muslims to assimilate Muhammad—and, by extension, Islam—to earlier religions and make a place for Muhammad and Islam in that Near Eastern religious narrative.”

Tariq Jaffer, assistant professor of religion, in a Reunion talk on how early Islamic communities created images of Muhammad

“I knocked my computer off my desk and I broke the period key off my laptop. Just my luck—I had a response paper due for Professor Smith’s intro to philosophy class the next day. So, with no time to waste and no period key to be found, I actually ended up having to write my response only with question marks and exclamation marks.”